Word: ranches
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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George Bush is roaming around his Prairie Chapel ranch house in boots, slacks and a linen shirt, naming the native grasses, spotting the herons--admiring the butterflies, for heaven's sake. This is to be a day of image softening, and another magazine's crew is waiting to do a family photo shoot. Bush has remade this Texas landscape to suit him: put in a lake and stocked it, planted the oaks and laid out the house so the winds would sweep through it. That's the way of his world: something to be shaped, by work and will. Whatever...
This is no photo op in a wildlife park for tourists on safari. This is Mugie Ranch, a commercial livestock operation in Kenya's Laikipia district, about six hours north of Nairobi. Some 14,000 sheep and 1,000 cattle graze here on the open grasslands, tended by 200 ranch hands. Barely a mile from the feasting lions, herders are bringing cattle and sheep into their nighttime pens, raising clouds of red dust. The herders whistle at their dogs, which are on the alert for lions--and for leopards, which go to the nearby water hole at night to feed...
Livestock owners around the world generally kill predators, but the 45,000-acre Mugie Ranch is trying something new. It is part of the Laikipia Predator Project, run by wildlife biologist Laurence Frank of the University of California, Berkeley, who is seeking better ways for big cats and humans to coexist. Adapting techniques from Masai tribesmen, who have herded cattle amid predators in this region for centuries, he is teaching ranchers to build taller, stronger bomas--traditional livestock pens made of thorn branches--to stop night-time raids by lions. When the herds are let out to graze during...
There is no simple way to reconcile expanding human populations and the territorial requirements of large predators. Whenever a choice has to be made, the needs of humans will trump those of big cats. Even on Mugie Ranch, where tolerance for lions is high, ranch manager Klaus Mortensen recently had to shoot a female lion he knew by name after she took to killing sheep. "If you don't move quickly, they teach the other lions [to do the same]," says Mortensen. Big cats cannot help themselves; they are natural-born killers. To keep them in a world where wilderness...
...together to train," says Martha, who assumed control of the training center as her husband moved away from coaching--apparently for good. "It is extremely important to train together regularly to have guidance and common ground so everybody is not coming from different places." The gymnasts invited to the ranch begin to bond as a team and get expert advice from Martha and a handful of specialists. The coaches scrutinize and refine techniques on each of the four apparatuses--balance beam, bars, vault and floor exercise...